Greetings from the Diver's Paradise . . .
BONAIRE REPORT - The place lives up to the billing as the entire economy (for the most part) is geared towards diving. We're staying at Buddy Dive in a variety of rooms and completed four dives today (Sunday), all on the house reef. We'll start boat diving tomorrow (2 per day + shore dives to follow). Water temp is 82-83 and viz was around 80 feet or so. Great conditions to start out the trip, although the tradewinds are blowing a bit stronger than normal. But that makes for fairly pleasant not-too-hot days and just slightly cool nights which overall is quite nice. I had hoped to share some pix with you but my camera wouldn't focus on the first dive and my GoPro stuff is giving me a "corrupted file" notice even though the files play back on my computer. Go figure. Hopefully better stuff in the days to come. But we're off to a good diving start and are looking forward to many memorable dives during the upcoming week. And . . .
SQUID VIDEO - We saw a bunch of Tarpon out in broad daylight, the River of Fish was back for our dusk dive, a number of eels, lots and lots of reef fish, and we had a couple of really nice encounters with a group of five squid. We saw them on three of the dives (always in the same area) and I was able to get one of the videos to load. It's short (one minute). Take a peek:
SQUID ENCOUNTER IN BONAIRE.
DR. BILL MEMORIAL - According to his FaceBook page, looks like it still set for June 12 at the Avalon Underwater Park, with a start time of around 11AM. Probably will run an hour or so and sounds like it'll be live-streamed. I'll get more solid details when I'm back from Bonaire.
EUGENIE CLARK STAMP - Hopefully you know of Eugenie Clark, aka "The Shark Lady." Along with Sylvia Earle, probably the two most prominent women scientist divers around. On what would have been her 100th birthday, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in her honor. (Pix was taken by David Doubilet.) Here's what a sheet of the stamps, available now at your local USPS branch, look like:
